It might be a cliche, but sometimes, a picture says more than a thousand words. Over the years, I've often talked about how the technology world is iterative, about how products are virtually always built upon that which came before, about how almost always, multiple people independently arrive at the same products since they work within the same constraints of the current state of technology. This elementary aspect of the technology world, which some would rather forget, has been illustrated very, very well in one of Samsung's legal filings against Apple.

Steve had a couple of talents: vision, eye for details, taste, forcing/persuading people do to his bidding and indeed saying no. Interestingly the co-founder of the world's most successful tech company wasn't very technical.

Xerox didn't know what they had, Parc Xerox did. Some at Xerox Parc were happy that Apple wanted to do something with their technology, others weren't.

It's funny how these seemingly small lucky events. I'd really love to know what would have happened in an alternate universe.

What if Steve hadn't visited Parc Xerox or didn't return to save Apple?
What if IBM didn't bother with the PC or Microsoft didn't buy QDOS?
What if Commodore hadn't gone bust?
What is OS/2 did manage to succeed?
What if Microsoft gave up after Windows 1.0?
What is Google had stuck to search?
What if Apple didn't think a mobile phone would sell?
What if BSD didn't have legal problems and Linus never started Linux?